Your Highness
If you watched “Pineapple Express,” the very funny pot-smoking action comedy that first united director David Gordon Green (an indie fave after “George Washington” and “All the Real Girls”) and his college buddy, Danny McBride, with James Franco, you can probably guess the obvious double meaning in the title of their latest film together. For the most part, it’s a perfect example of the level of comedy to expect in this sword-and-sorcery farce. There’s nothing wrong with going lowbrow– Monty Python did it brilliantly in their retelling of the search for the Holy Grail –but when all the film turns into is a parade of vulgar laughs going for the lowest common denominator (I mean, really, did we need an erect minotaur penis?), one wonders if the filmmakers have their priorities in order. Make no mistake: Green and his excessively talented cast here (which includes not just McBride and Franco but Natalie Portman and Zooey Deschanel as the ladies who steal these men’s hearts) manage some of the same absurdist humor that made “Pineapple Express” a comedy hit; in fact, Justin Theroux is particularly inspired as the evil wizard, Leezar, and where the Hell did that pot-smoking perv of a warlock come from? But even the Python boys worked with a safety net at least, even if their humor was otherwise pure anarchy; reportedly, the script for this film (by McBride and Ben Best) was abandoned on-set in favor of heavy improvisation. As a result, “Your Highness” is an unfocused and shoddy film that revels in all manner of silliness and forgets that, even in a farce, we still need to care about what’s happening.
